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Show "POET OFjilERRAS" Famous Old Joaquin Miller Busy Compiling His Works. Patriarch Explains Why He Has Refused Re-fused Tempting Offers to Lecture Lives on Mountain Top Overlooking Over-looking 'Frisco Bay. San Francisco. Sitting on the door step of his cabin home, The Hites, 2,000 feet up in the mountains behind Oakland, Joaquin Miller, "the Poet of the Sierras," explained the other day why he had refused an offer to tout the United States and England as a lecturer. It was neither because the patriarch poet is averse to revisiting the scenes of his first triumphs as an exponent of the native wonders of the country to the west of the Rockies, nor because be-cause a money inducement was lacking. lack-ing. The nature lover won't come down out of his mountain home until he has finished his work of compiling compil-ing a combination autobiography, history his-tory and all his poems he believes are worth perpetuating. There are to be six volumes, and proofs of the first volume have just been delivered to the author. For many years, how many no one on the mountain side or in Oakland is able to say, Joaquin Miller has made his headquarters on the big sweeping table land on the very top of the mountain moun-tain overlooking San Francisco bay, and as far back as the oldest inhabitant's inhabit-ant's memory goes he has always supported sup-ported one or more youthful, aspiring artists and poets. To house these proteges pro-teges the poet has built from time to time replicas of his own cabin, until to-day there are ' a dozen little, odd-shaped odd-shaped buildings, each one containing only one room and all with high peaked roofs and stained glass win-, dows. On one of the two peaks rising above the table, land, 1,000 acres in extent, and all of it the property of the venerable ven-erable poet, is a great stone monument, monu-ment, erected by Joaquin Miller himself, him-self, and marking, so he declares with apparent sincerity, "the grave of Moses.' "If Moses isn't buried here, where Is he buried?" is the poet's never fail- Ing query of all who suggest that the Idea is absurd. On the other peak is the cemetery In which are buried the poet's mother, his daughter, several old friends of the days of '49, whose dying wish was that they lie in the little brush-fence brush-fence plot watched over by Joaquin Miller. Also in the cemetery are many cats aud dogs. Towering up beside the cemetery, and a landmark that can be seen 20 miles off down in the valley, is the great funeral pyre of rough stone Joaquin Miller fashioned with his own hands. It is hollow and the top is covered with iron grill work. Inside this hollow space is nilerl srv- eral cords of oil-soaked wood. At his death the poet's body will be placed on top of the pyre and the ashes that remain will be "scattered to the four winds." In dedicating his autobiography to the memory of his parents, Joaquin Miller asks permission to introduce himself, "for it really seems to me that from the day I was suddenly discovered and pointed out in London Lon-don I have been an entire stranger In my own land; the land I have loved, lived for, battled for from the first. As for that red-shirted and hairy man bearing my name abroad, and 'standing before kings,' I never saw him, never heard of him until on returning to my own country I found that this unpleasant and entirely impossible figure ever attended at-tended and even overshadowed my most earnest work." So much doubt has shrouded Joaquin Miller's parentage that his own statement state-ment of his early history has peculiar interest "My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west," he writes. "I was born in a covered wagon, I am told, at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio, wherein my mother was born. My mother's people were Dutch, not Germans, Ger-mans, as has been so often said, and they were the oldest Dutch in the land. My grandfather Miller, of Scotch stock, from Kentucky, fell at Fort Meigs on the Maumee river. I have read he was an officer, but hope and believe he was of the ranks. Please let the dead patriot escape the persecution perse-cution of idiots seeking an ancestry." |